Introduction

The difference from version 0.1.0 is sizeable – all the 2013 census data has been removed and is now in a companion package, nzcensus. This is for ease of development and maintenance, and to allow organisations that aren’t interested in the election results still to use the census data. It also keeps the package size within CRAN guidelines. I’ll write about nzcensus in a separate post; its coverage has somewhat expanded from when I last blogged about combining census and election data. nzcensus is only available from GitHub due to its size.

The changes to nzelect and the creation of nzcensus are not backwards-compatible; the code in posts I wrote in April will no longer run out of the box. However, the changes needed are small and in the comments under those posts I’ve provided links to working versions.

The New Zealand Electoral Commission had no involvement in preparing this package and bear no responsibility for any errors. In the event of any uncertainty about election results, refer to the definitive source materials on their website.

Usage

The functionality of the voting results part of the nzelect package hasn’t changed since the GitHub version in April. All the results are verified against the official election results. Results are available by voting place and are easy to aggregate up by electorate of enrolment and by meshblock, area unit, territorial authority and regional council by voting location. The package has a vignette with some basic analysis ideas.

Here’s one idea that’s not in the vignette – mapping the precise casting location of party votes in a city:

Here’s the code for producing that map of Christchurch. Thanks to David Kahle and Hadley Wickham for the ggmap package which makes it easy (amongst other things) to provide backgrounds for maps. These particular map tiles are by Stamen Design, under CC BY 3.0. Data by OpenStreetMap, under ODbL.